MCP skills can no longer be distributed as .tar.gz or .zip archives via the mcp-skill-archive: URI scheme. The entire archive download, extraction, validation, and caching pipeline has been removed.
If you were distributing skills this way, you must now distribute them as direct MCP server resources or as local directory skills. Skills already cached from previous versions may remain on disk in the extraction directory but will no longer be updated or loaded.
Evidence
All tar/zip archive parsing functions removed (search for "mcp-skill-archive:", "Downloading skill archive from" — these strings are absent from v2.1.208)
Strings lifted out of the shipped bundle, so the claim above can be checked against them.